DVD Review: The Forbidden Kingdom

If the Chinese would ever produce the Lord of the Rings, the Forbidden Kingdom would be it. Well, no. If you can ever translate American Chinese food into a movie, the Forbidden Kingdom would be it. Yup, that's more accurate.

The story utilized quite a few Chinese Taoist fairy tales and folk stories; the infamous monkey king which is also utilized by the Japanese for Dragonball Z; the Jade Warrior who guards the gates to heaven; the 8 dieties who reminds the world that everyone could be a deity no matter rich or poor, young or old, man or woman; the cherry blossom utopia; and the white bride which has been another movie from Hong Kong cinema. Throwing in the two biggest Asian Kung Fu star in Hong Kong and Hollywood, you've got here a guaranteed blockbuster. I should be thrilled to see so many Chinese reference in one movie, but I've got a beef with it. There are tons of Taoist fairy tales out there that would be great translated to a movie all on it's own, these kinda chop suey style pulling a character from this story and another from somewhere else and make them fight is not only disrespectful but borderline sacreligious. It's almost the same as Disney rewriting our childhood fairy tales.

The wed between HK cinema and Hollywood is a bit ridiculous as well. How do you explain a boy traveling through time to ancient China and all the sudden everyone in it is speaking English? It's Back To The Future meets Lord of the Rings meets Karate Kid. Yes, it's exciting with all the fighting and chasing around, but at some point it gets to be too much and unbelievable.

The secret is that all Hong Kong movie stars like Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Chow Yuen Fat, Stephen Chou and everyone else take pride on making it to Big Time Hollywood. But a lot of times they are used to producing lower budget films and don't quite know what to do with a bigger budget, so they make up these big ideas that they think will guarantee a box office sell but end up being mediocre. I remember a time Jackie Chan shined just with his moves and his personality and people overlooked the lower grade productions, now it seems to be the other way around, the productions have overshadowed his talents. But then both Jet and Jackie are aging, I wonder where are the newer generations of Kung Fu masters.

Other than Jet Li who played the monkey king and a monk, and Jackie Chan who played one of the immortal deities, the other younger cast members are actually quite charming. Michael Angarano of Sky High fame plays our protagonist, a young man who's in charge of returning a weapon to the monkey king. He's very likable and I think I spotted chest hairs. Yum! Liu Yifei is quite pretty and I think I mentioned her on this post, well maybe not but she's the girl on the poster. Her character kept refering to herself as a third person in the movie which was weird. Li BingBing was quite good playing the white bride, deliciously evil.

Like my view on American-Chinese food, I'm not saying that this movie is bad. I'm just saying that it's terribly unauthentic and 3 hours after watching it, I'm left with not much memory of it. There is no substance, no nutritional value. C